Disha

  At its heart, pizza is deceptively simple. Made from just a few humble ingredients – baked dough, tangy sauce, melted cheese and maybe a few toppings – it might seem like a perfect candidate for the kind of mass-produced standardization that defines many global food chains, where predictable menus reign supreme. Yet, visit two pizzerias in different towns – or even on different blocks of the same town – and you’ll find that pizza stubbornly refuses to be homogenized.  a local  that documents the commercial landscape of Gainesville, Florida, in the 20th and 21st centuries. As part of that project, we’ve spent a great many hours over the past two years  especially those behind Gainesville’s independent pizzerias. What we’ve found reaffirms a powerful truth: Pizza resists sameness – and small pizzerias are a big reason why. Why standardized pizza rose but didn’t conquer While tomatoes were unknown in Italy  they have since become synonymous with It...